The Thrones of Kronos (72 page)

“Ruler of all, ruler of naught.” The specter’s voice was
breathy, with weird overtones in it that caught at Barrodagh’s nerves. He began
to tremble.

“Power unlimited, a prison unsought.” The figure of
Eusabian’s enemy finished the quote and laughed.

Hatred and anger seared through the Avatar, the more
powerful for his powerlessness. He hadn’t even a jac. Where had this thing come
from? Then he remembered the link to Arthelion and the Palace computer.

“Your heir rests from his labors, giving me time to deal
with you, Jerrode Eusabian. Do you remember what my greatson foretold for you,
in the Palace I built, long ago, on distant Arthelion?”

Eusabian clutched his dirazh’u in both hands, drawing
strength from the decades of curses woven into it since his father Urtigen had
given it to him in the eglarrh demachi-Dirazh‘ul. He would not answer a computer
construct.

“You are impatient.” The specter’s voice boomed from all
around them. Through the low rumble of the amplified voice Eusabian could hear
Barrodagh’s teeth chattering. “Do not be. Do you not remember? ‘All time will
be yours, yet no time will be enough.’”

Wrath forced the Avatar to speech. “I remember that he is
dead, and I hold his Throne.”

“You held two Thrones, for a time, as my greatson foresaw.
But you are at this very moment abandoning this one.” The ghost gestured,
indicating the walls around them. Light glared from its hands. “And you will
never again see the other, for I will not let you leave, Eusabian of Dol’jhar.
Your paliach is ended. You have failed.” It pointed past him, back the way they
had come. “I could entomb you here, but it pleases me to stay my hand because
your destiny awaits you. Go meet it.”

His jaw aching with murderous fury, Eusabian stared at the
specter. He knew it was a mere computer construct, loosed somehow in the
station’s arrays. But it had control of the stasis clamps.

There was no way he could get around it.

Until the arrays are
destroyed.

Eusabian took a spiral path away from the landing bay. Barrodagh
guessed that he wished to remain in proximity to the ship that was waiting for
him when the arrays were destroyed, and with them the ghost’s power. But
without the Tarkans, they rapidly lost their sense of direction; worse, nexus
after nexus closed before them, webs of bluish light flickering through the
walls as the construct chivvied them away from escape. They encountered no one,
not even, after a time, any corpses.

The Avatar began muttering under his breath. The scraps of
phrases that reached Barrodagh’s ears made his legs weak with terror. Never had
he heard such fury in Eusabian’s voice, and the glimpses he caught of the
Avatar’s dirazh’u were even more frightening: a knot of horrible complexity,
twenty years of passion and desire thwarted.

At length they found themselves at the entrance to the Urian
ship bay. It was deserted. Several ships, partially dismembered, protruded from
the walls, but the one the Avatar had imprinted stood unmarred.

Eusabian studied it, then turned Barrodagh’s way. “Contact
Altasz Jesserian,” he commanded, motioning at the Bori’s compad. “Arthelion
must be destroyed, the Palace put to the torch, and every living being put to
the sword. Nothing must be left standing: no wall, no creature, no blade of
grass.”

Barrodagh stared at him. The Avatar knew the compad was
broken. Otherwise, why had he not commanded Barrodagh to contact Chur-Mellikath?
He saw his own reflection in the Avatar’s dead-black eyes: there was no sanity
behind that gaze, only hatred and fury.

“Lord,” he choked, fearing that in the next moment
Eusabian’s strong hands would rend him, bone and muscle, just as the Ogres rent
their victims. “I cannot.” He hefted the compad in his trembling fingers. “The
communicator is broken.”

Eusabian stared for a wrenching length of time, then stalked
toward the Urian ship.

Barrodagh’s knees locked. Terror nearly overwhelmed his own
grasp on sanity. He could not believe the Avatar would actually board the alien
ship.

He cast a yearning glance back at the rest of the Suneater,
but to be alone meant only protracted, ignominious death at the hands of the
underlings. There was nothing safe for him anywhere.

A strangled sob escaped his lips as he dropped the useless
compad and scuttled after his master.

o0o

Eusabian stood in front of the Urian vessel he had
imprinted.
“If it were launched, where
would it go? Another Suneater, do you suppose?”

He stepped over the yellow line. The ship’s hull puckered
open, a gaping mouth moving counter to the hypnotic spinning of the hull. An
illusion, Lysanter had said.

The possibility of another Suneater. Was that an illusion?

No. Twenty years said it was not, could not be. His destiny
did await him, a destiny that would encompass the utter ruin of the Thousand
Suns. He would leave no sun unblasted. A hecatomb of trillions would be his
tribute to Dol.

He stepped forward, ignoring a sort of wet squeak from his
secretary. The ship received him. Barrodagh’s halting step followed, but Eusabian
did not look back. There was no longer room in his mind for anyone but himself.

The pucker sealed. The walls around them cleared to
transparency, leaving visible only the floor underfoot.

Eusabian resumed his curse-weaving, knot after careful knot
entwining all his enemies.

The ship began to move.

Once again Lysanter muttered praise of Tatriman as he
followed the schematic on his compad, still linked to the arrays in the lab.
With her programs he was able to detect and avoid the battles tearing up the
corridors, even though something was steadily degrading the computing power of
the system.

The schematic paused in the midst of an update. He stopped
and tapped at his compad, wresting a portion of the waning power away from
other tasks to complete the map. The instruments in the Chamber of Kronos were
now useless. Perhaps in the array lab he could find some way of in interpreting
what was happening.

As he headed for a side corridor a hand plucked at his
sleeve. “Gnostor,” Dasariol said.

Lysanter stared in astonishment at the terrified Throne Room
techs, following in a clump behind him. “The landing bay is that way.” The
woman’s shaking hand indicated the opposite direction.

“I know, Dasariol.” He indicated the compad. “We’d not get
there alive. Pass tags are no good against Tarkan or Marine jacs.”

There was no further protest as he led them to the array
lab, but his professional detachment—the years of denial—vanished like smoke
when he saw the carnage outside. Lysanter’s knees weakened, and his mouth went
dry.

The neutrality of scientific inquiry was gone. If it had
ever existed.
It was I who made it
possible for the Dol’jharians to command these Ogre monstrosities.
This
pile of corpses was the evidence.

Blood and bits of tissue squelched under his feet as he
forced himself to enter the empty lab, but he was too sickened to react. Dimly
he heard one of the Bori vomit as he turned anxiously to the arrays. They were
unharmed.

He moved swiftly to his console, linked his compad, and
began a series of DLs. He tried to escape into the safe haven of pure
science—trying to decide what data to save, stuffing data chips into his
pockets at random—when a window from the stellar monitor caught his attention.

New fear thrilled through his nerves when he saw the
radiation readouts from the red giant companion of the black hole. The Suneater
was preparing to fulfill its function. How much time did they have?

But how to escape? He tried scanning through the station.
The imagers he could tap told him much: the Marines were pressing the Tarkans
heavily, although the defenders still held the landing bay.

His console bleeped. Something—no, two somethings—were loose
in the arrays. One had taken over control of the stasis clamps. The other had
eaten most of the array power devoted to crypto. Both had Panarchic signatures,
and the fact that they no longer bothered to conceal themselves from even his
cursory search told him more than anything he saw on the imagers.

Now he knew why the attackers seemed to know their way
around so well. The worms had compromised the hyperwave. But that, at least,
told him where he must go next.

An image appeared from the Urian ship bay: Eusabian,
entering the Urian ship he had imprinted on. His secretary gave one despairing
glance around the empty bay and scrambled after him.

Lysanter watched, fascinated, as the ship’s hull cleared to
transparency. It floated up the central mound and slowly sank from sight
through the opening in it.

What will he see?
For a few seconds he sustained a profound envy, intensified by the conviction
that Eusabian was ill-equipped to appreciate what he was experiencing.

Lysanter waited impatiently until his compad chimed,
indicating that its storage was full. That, and the data chips he’d grabbed,
would have to do. He regretted all the data he would have to leave behind. But
the success of the Panarchist attack said that someone out there understood at
least part of the quantum-information theory that had given him the keys to the
Suneater. The data in his compad would be welcome, he had no doubt.

But will it buy me
forgiveness?

If he survived, doubtless he’d have a lot of time to
consider that question. For now, he could start on the answer by saving himself
and those with him. He turned to the techs waiting in terrified silence. “We’ll
go to the hyperwave chamber,” he said. “The Panarchists will doubtless have had
that as a main objective. They are our hope for escape now.”

As they left, Lysanter heard the whine of Tarkan armor
approaching the array room. He and his techs began to run.

o0o

“Admiral, communications from the
Fist of Dol’jhar
to the Rifters have suddenly degraded to Class
Four algorithms for all ships.” Wychyrski’s voice was tired but triumphant.
“They know. Still onetime to the Suneater, though.”

“AyKay,” said Ng. “Communications, commence jamming.”

She did not try to keep the smile out of her voice. The
Moral Sabotage specialists had assembled some of the juiciest Rifter broadcasts
into a mélange guaranteed to drive the puritanical Dol’jharians wild. Then
there were the constant offers of amnesty and other propaganda designed to sap
the will of Dol’jhar’s Rifter allies. She wondered how many lives it would
save.

“Siglnt, how long a message from the Marines can you detect
if they tap into the hyperwave on the Suneater, given our transmissions?”

“If they can blip for three seconds, we’ll catch it.”

As little as that.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time so little stood between
life and death. Nor the last.

o0o

Ever since Anaris’s order had been reported to him and
he’d ordered Communications to modify crypto accordingly, Juvaszt had waited,
on edge, for what he knew was coming. And wondering, between his constant
battle assessments and commands, what was happening on the Suneater.

But despite his attempts to prepare himself psychologically,
Juvaszt felt all the wrath of humiliation when the main communications screen
dissolved into a disgusting chaos of overt sexual display and depraved orgies,
interspersed with propaganda aimed at prying the Rifter ships away from their
allegiance to Dol’jhar. More infuriating was the knowledge that the Rifters
were seeing it all.

He glared at the communications officer, who stared
witlessly at him in horror.

“Kyvernat, the enemy has commenced jamming.” He gaped as on
the screen, for all to see, the infamous chocolate vid flared to life. Some of
the bridge crew stared, transfixed; others looked hastily away. The Dol’jharian
captain ground his teeth as the officer continued. “As we feared, without the
station arrays, our discriminators cannot handle the load consistently.”

Juvaszt bit back a searing reply—that would merely hand the
victory to the Panarchists. He looked around the bridge, noting with satisfaction
that everyone was now concentrating fiercely on their tasks. In fact this might
end up less distracting, for none would dare be caught looking at the
communications relay unless it involved their assigned job.

“Very well,” he said. “Cut the comm watches to an hour and
put as many officers on the discriminator consoles as you need.”

Then he turned back to the battle at hand: supporting, one
by one, the Rifter actions against the asteroids the Panarchists had chosen for
their attack. If he only had another battlecruiser!
If wishes were weapons, we’d all be lords.

A few minutes later a gout of light from the tactical screen
announced the destruction of a Panarchist cruiser. Then a flare marked the
disintegration of the asteroid it had been protecting.

Flushed with the thrill of victory, Juvaszt snapped out the
orders to take them to the next action. With the Suneater’s power backing them,
he only needed one battlecruiser.

o0o

As Hreem and Marim stalked along the corridors, he kept
laughing. The look on Riolo’s face before the Ogre ripped his head off! If
there’d been more time, it would have been so sweet to make him beg. It would
also have been interesting to find out what Barca really sent him for—and why
they’d planted him on the
Lith
.

Remembering the shock he’d felt when he realized the
chatzing little trog spoke Dol’jharian made him burn with anger. Obedience,
that’s what he expected from his crew. Obedience, and no chatzing secrets. He
didn’t care what they did with, or to, each other in their cabins, or how they
spent their part of the take. But no one made plans except Hreem—if they wanted
to live.